by Simon Ings
Dad kept records of our guests on the laptop behind the check-in desk. The photographs all seemed to have been taken in the same room, against the same wall – as though the country’s entire military had climbed one by one out of the same tank, and left by the same magnolia-painted corridor into the bleak, wet light of the same car park.
Everyone sported the same regulation haircut. There were a handful of blonds but none of the ones with the lightest hair – hair that might just be albino-white if they grew it out – looked like the soldier I remembered. Perhaps his hair had turned white after the photograph was taken, bleached by a nameless terror as in a second-rate ghost story.
Face folded into face until I could no longer call to mind what my quarry looked like. So much for that.
FOURTEEN
Dogmen have me surrounded. They yip and slaver, waving crude knock-off AKs, their bandoliers glittering in the Middle’s glass reflections of a red and bloated sun. The streets are swimming in their oil-black blood but still they mass, overcoming the city’s defences.
‘Up here!’ A rookie firewoman grabs my hand; a fizzing sensation courses up my arm. ‘Come on!’ She moves up the stairwell ahead of me with an athletic, pneumatic grace. I struggle to keep up with her. Sweat runs into my eyes. Behind me comes a sick and frantic skittering – engineered claws on polished tile. They’re after us.
‘In here!’ She’s found a portal. She pauses, chest heaving, waiting for me to plunge my fist into the fizzing blue-green wall. The amulet on my arm glows dazzling white and the portal shreds itself clear and we find ourselves newly arrived at the municipal command centre, nerve ganglion of the dying city.
The armies of the Augmented are already massing at the gates. The best we can do now is set the place to self-destruct, robbing them of their prize. If they seize control of the city and its weaponry, then there can be no hope for the human diaspora pouring from the gates.
The command centre is built on many levels, balconies and mezzanines. Droids, faceless and beneficent, tend and mend its little fires and short-outs. We move among them as they carry equipment from one place to another.
(The shopping mall, so secure and so surveilled, provided us with countless camera points. Layering real-time AR over its surfaces, tenants and clientele has been a joy. The trouble is the mall itself – it’s far too well-designed. People move round this place so calmly, we have had to cast them as faceless ‘bots’. Even so, their lack of urgency kicks a sizeable hole in a game that is, after all, about action. We should have gone for our first idea and cast the shoppers as zombies. But we had neither the time nor the resources to engineer how the undead might react to a player’s presence. Bared bloody fangs, and flailing arms (barely attached: one falls off and crawls away – a neat sight gag), and the judicious application of projectile vomit – we had all these ideas storyboarded, and abandoned them with reluctance. According to our game bible, the bots – their heads as blank as eggs, their limbs a liquid chrome – are attempting a hopeless repair of the city’s failing systems. Frankly they look like what they are: shoppers, laden with bags and pushing prams, all hidden and homogenised under the most cursory AR skinning.)
A scream is cut off mid-flow by a blinding light and glass shatters. The firewoman hesitates, reels, and turns. A shard of blue glass as big as a meat cleaver has pierced her chest. Blood flecks her mouth as she tries to speak. ‘Kill the . . . the city.’ (Christ, how did this stunt get through QA?) ‘Save . . . the . . .’
She falls into me, already rotting and crumbling as nano-engineered bacteria pronounce her clinically dead and therefore ripe for scavenging. Her breadcrumb corpse collides with me – a shivering rain and a little breeze. And on the breeze, a word – ‘w-o-r-l-d’ – and she is gone. My only helpmate on this level. Dead. Kill the city. Save the world. I am alone.
Scritch scratch.
A dogman has emerged from the portal. Grenades hang from leather belts criss-crossed over its heaving silver chest. Round its middle finger, raised in obscene insult to the human world, the pin, on its little wire ring, still dangles. He shakes it free of its claw and it lands on the floor with a bright sound. The dogman pulls its lips back in a grin and howls. How on earth did this monster get through the portal? The portal’s supposed to be locked to everyone but—
The dogman waves a severed human arm above its head. Round its wrist is an amulet. An amulet like mine.
Oh. Nice.
I run.
Criss-crossing the Middle air, policebots swivel to check my progress. Red warning lights checker the ground before me, slowing me up. Any faster, and the police will shoot. (We cooked this gag up to manage the player’s behaviour in crowded spaces. We don’t want people so taken up by the game that they go rocketing into mothers with prams and old men laden with the week’s groceries. Our bible, wrought in Michel’s deathless prose, does its best to weave these restrictions into the storyline: ‘The city is a strict, borderline-psychotic nanny, and riots and rebellions of the frustrated human populus have brought the predatory dogmen down on the city.’
The policebot is blind to body type. It’ll blast a speeding dogman down as cheerfully as it will me. This makes the chase a game of strategy rather than speed. As I weave past bots (well, shoppers) towards the escalator, the dogman (pure avatar) pursues me on a marginally more efficient trajectory, ever nearer, its breath ever hotter as I—
(Stop.)
I pull the wrapshades from my face. The earpieces, cooling, know to close down the rest of the kit. Item: a plastic mesh threaded through my hair. Item: gluey residues painted on my hands and face. Item: a thin Lycra top threaded with smart elastic – a slick descendant of the kind of vests my father stitched together for blind servicemen. Item: trainers, their thick soles packed with machinery. For all this, I feel a deal less self-conscious now than I did a year ago. A year is a long time in this business, and every part of Loophole’s AR player’s kit has been miniaturised to the point where the wearer can be forgiven for forgetting that it’s there.
The escalator leads to a cool concrete atrium, an airy space which, in its fidelity to the first-person-shooter aesthetic, looks a deal more gameable than our own, digitally generated AR skinning.
The metro here has a double-door system to prevent people hurling themselves inconsiderately onto the line. There’s a man at the end of the platform, in a grey lapel-less suit and smart shoes. He’s weaving and bobbing at his own reflection in the glass wall. The other passengers are giving him a wide berth. It’s going to take a while for people to habituate to gamer behaviour. After all, it took a little while for us to ignore the way people with handsfree phones talked into the air. AR is much more intrusive, and people’s tolerance to its casual public use is far less predictable. The man reaches towards the glass wall, his fingers scrabbling the air. Is he typing? Grappling? I wonder if he’s one of our first-adopters, a party guest, in which case he’ll be heading where I’m heading now, out of the Middle and on to the outdoor launch event organised by Michel’s producer, Bryon Vaux. I should put my glasses back on, go up to the man, test for myself the collaborative side of our game. But I have had enough. I am out of breath, and at the back of my mind hovers the unignorable possibility that the man might not be experiencing an Augmented Reality at all. For all his recent haircut and respectable clothing, he may just be crazy.
The train arrives. I’m finding it hard to shake off the paranoia induced by our game. From where I’m sitting I have a good clear view of six people. A harassed, gimlet-faced woman in a sari. Her bespectacled daughter. A young builder with tattoos who seems determined to sit with his legs as wide apart as possible, as though he were about to give birth. A man whose white facial hair, busy shirt, red-threaded tweed jacket, black boots and expensive retro wristwatch combine in such a messy and confusing way, I’d never be able to identify him in a line-up. Two animated African tourists trying to swap something from one mobile phone to another.
Of these, Glasses Girl
, Clown Man and Legs Akimbo have allowed their attention to be snatched away. The girl’s glasses are cheap half-silvered jobs, and from the flickering petrol-sheen smothering her eyes I can just about identify which space-opera she’s watching. The other two are a scarier proposition, their pupils and irises silvered behind active contact lenses. These lenses are probably not AR-enabled, because the men’s heads are too still, absorbed in some reasonably static immersive environment. They’re reading, or more likely watching. Legs’s thumbs are twitching but they’re bare and clean, free of any shiny trail of conductive gel, so his movements are more likely a tic, rather than virtual keypresses.
It shouldn’t be such an effort, seeing what strangers are up to on a train. My heart shouldn’t still be racing, as it’s racing now. The game is over, but it seems to me it’s been replaced, not with any sense of the normal, but with another, creepier, more insidious game.
Ten minutes later I change trains for a more direct service, underground at first, then elevated, that stitches a path round suburban hills, up to and through the highest of the city’s ring of mountains. The city sprawls here because the valley soil is mostly sand. Any building above four storeys tends to keel over – a fact learned the hard way by ambitious ecclesiastical architects hundreds of years ago. All the really tall buildings – the high-rise blocks and the most ancient cathedrals – are built upon the rock outcrops that rise from the flat valley floor like teeth in a gum. The hills are called islands. Isle of This, Isle of That. The coincidence wasn’t lost on Michel, whose game bible climaxes with the city inundated by a rising flood, skinned with burning petrol. This is pure fantasy. We are too far inland for an inundation.
My phone rings.
‘Where are you?’
‘I’m running late.’
‘Are you on the train?’
‘Yes.’
‘How far from the stop are you?’
‘About a minute.’ The train is already throttling down.
‘I’ll wait for you.’
‘Cheers, Ralf.’
This evening – and for the first time ever – Ralf chooses the restaurant. Its walls are hung with antique plates, white with multicoloured designs. The proprietress tells us about them – how all the colours come from a single pigment. How you won’t find these plates produced anywhere outside the Levant. It is a quaint assertion, as though her little restaurant could have somehow sidestepped centuries of relentless globalisation.
‘Don’t knock it till you’ve tasted the food.’
‘I’m not knocking anything.’ How strange, though, to be following Ralf’s recommendation.
‘Is Michel coming to this party, do you know?’ Ralf is a fan of Michel’s books. He has a full set of slipcased hardbacks, signed. It’s one of the reasons Loophole has fallen further and further under the spell of Bryon Vaux. Michel’s books are the source material for Vaux’s most lucrative film franchise, and Ralf has wanted to apply Loophole’s every technical innovation to better realise Michel’s world.
When Ralf heard that Michel was going to be writing our game bible, he was like a kid on his way to see Santa Claus. Sadly, Michel has proved every bit as elusive as the real Father Christmas, communicating with us only by written word. I don’t know whether this is just pressure of work, or some personal fall-out from Christmas.
Either way, Ralf is one disappointed fan.
‘Vaux will be there, I suppose.’
Ralf puffs himself up at that. Ralf, as Chief Imagineer, has met Bryon Vaux several times now. ‘I’ll introduce you,’ he says, as though this were a favour specially in his gift. There’s a pomposity comes over Ralf whenever he talks about Vaux. I used to find it touching, but now it has begun to irritate me. It’s not entirely Ralf’s fault. He is now, of necessity, one of the great producer’s gatekeepers. Every digital entrepreneur and failed screenwriter and wooden drama student wants a piece of him.
Our food arrives. Ralf sits back to make room for the proprietress. He has a paunch now. He’s going to have to watch that. I let him order for me, curious to discover what has so excited his retarded palate.
One bite and I’m flailing for the salep jug.
Ralf laughs. ‘You see?’
The salep, warm and creamy, gums round the fire in my throat like a retardant foam. My whole mouth sings. ‘What is this stuff?’
Ralf shrugs, pleased with himself for so surprising me. ‘It’s real çig köfte. There’s this spice in it called isot. A kind of black paprika.’
A minute later I’m recovered enough to dare another mouthful. And another. And another. I wish to God I hadn’t eaten earlier, this stuff is delicious. ‘How did you find this place?’
‘It’s one of Vaux’s haunts,’ Ralf says. ‘His local.’
‘Yes?’
‘He has a house near here.’
The menus come around again. I say, ‘They have a milk dessert on here called Chicken Breast. How does that work?’ It occurs to me that I have become Ralf.
Ralf pulls out his phone and checks the time. ‘We’d better settle up.’
The sun is low in the sky and, in the park, the young spring foliage shines like foil. The party is set up in the ornamental garden. Brick steps climb the hillside. Paths send out branches at precise, perpendicular angles. The effect is softened by all the planting wound round the trellises and gazebos: lilac and clematis, grapevine and rose. Come summer, there will be welcome shade here. This early in the year, it’s easy enough to find gaps in the screening foliage to enjoy the view. This evening the city, softened into butter by the sun, puddles around the blue paste jewel of the Middle.
Guests stand chatting in small, nervous groups among the stone seats, ornamental nooks, fountains and artful screens. Waiters in whites move among us with champagne and canapés.
‘Glasses on, people!’
And here he comes. Laughing. Glad-handing. Ralf turns and nudges me. I wince against the flashlight spraying and rippling through the leaves and through the crowd that gathers around us as people surge forward to grab their five-second shake-and-grin with our legendary host.
Sunlight catches in his shocked-white hair.
‘What’s the matter, Connie?’
His hair.
‘Bryon!’
Vaux knows Ralf’s voice. He turns.
There is something here I am missing. Something obvious and terrible.
‘Conrad’s here! You haven’t met. My business partner. Bryon!’
His face lights up, seeing Ralf among all these anonymous, uplifted faces. Photographers surround him, lighting him up like a poster. No army drab this time. A tux, and wrapround shades so shiny, featureless and deadly black, they might be a single piece of enamel.
Camera flash streaks across the big black lenses of his shades as he reaches out to shake my hand. A beat. ‘Conrad?’ He hesitates. Bryon Vaux. Producer of Michel’s Shaman franchise. Majority shareholder in Loophole.
‘Connie?’
The crowd carries him on. My hands hang limp and lifeless at my sides.
‘Conrad?’
I turn away to face the city, and pulling my wraprounds from my pocket, I let myself slip back into the game.
The city has been rendered down to a jumble of charcoal-grey plinths – stone footprints where building after building has been magicked away. At this distance only the biggest, most rectilinear footprints stand out. Most of the city is reduced to rubble. This is my home with its inner chaos exposed, no more now than a ghastly iteration of the same salt crystal. City as tumour. A spreading circle of dead tissue. City as leprosy. ‘Ralf. I’ve met him.’
‘What?’
‘Vaux. I’ve met him.’
‘Really? Where?’
I shake my head. I don’t want to talk about this, after all. Not here. ‘Doesn’t matter.’ Vaux is older now, of course. Much older. Nonetheless, wealth and the years have been kind to him. There can be no mistake.
Across the horizon, fires leap. Ash drifts in waves
. The air shimmers with imagineered heat as bit by bit the city disappears under the pall of its annihilation.
This is the man who accosted me. This is the man who exposed himself to me. This is the man I left Mum standing near, the last day I saw her alive.
A lot of water has passed under the bridge since those days when Gabby used to turn up at our hotel on ‘delousing leave’. Whenever she returned from the protest camp for a few days’ R&R, you could spot her a mile off from her shag of rat-tailed hair. You could smell her. Nowadays she dresses conservatively, in linen suits and tailored white shirts. She lives abroad, pursuing an academic career. Behind her, fuzzy and foreshortened in the lens of her laptop’s camera, her office wall is a mass of sticky notes and dry-marker scribble. ‘Is this about your dad?’
When I lost touch with my father finally, in the weeks after the car accident, Gabby did what she could to trace his electronic signature for me. Her academic studies and radical politics have given her some insight into where and how information is actually structured, beneath the reassuring blandishments of clouds and commercial search engines. ‘Pretty much nothing is ever lost,’ she told me, confidently. But silence is silence, whichever way you cut it, and we never did find my dad.
‘Not exactly.’ I tell her, wishing I had my story straight. ‘It’s more to do with the hotel.’
‘I knew there’d be something you wanted.’
‘Poor Gabby. It’s the price you pay for actually knowing how to do stuff.’
‘“How are you, Gabriela?” “I’m fine, Conrad. How are you?”’
‘I’m crap at keeping in touch, I know.’
‘The price of this call is that you come and visit me here. I mean it.’
‘Okay.’
‘I mean it. Give me a date.’
Eventually she stops twisting my arm, and I can ask her, ‘Could our old hotel records still be any place?’
This turns out to be more likely than I expected. There’s a regulation says that guesthouses have to maintain their customer records for a couple of years. ‘No-one ever gets around to deleting the expired data. Why would they bother?’